David Delmar, founder and executive producer of Resilient Coders knows that sustainable social justice can’t be achieved just by charity – economic empowerment is the ticket.
Talent doesn’t always equal success. From the get-go, even the most ambitious people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and young adults of less economic advantage don’t have equal access to education, exposure, and opportunity.
Resilient Coders works with an understanding of this, incorporating mentorship and support networks into the program. Here’s how the program works. Once a cohort has been recruited through hackathons, they begin an 8-week bootcamp, learning hards kills (Javascript, HTML, etc) and soft skills (communication techniques).
Some students get hired straight out of camp, others move on to the Resilient Lab – a digital design and development agency where mentors work with the recent grads in working with real clients.
To the techies that come up to Delmar asking what they can do, he says, “I need you to think differently about a problem we’ve consistently failed to solve.”
The first step: be open to the idea that equal opportunity is possible and get to working on it.
